Part of the reason for this is that commercial yeast, used in all baking, is developed to be fast acting, in other words, for convenience. The full nutritional value of bread is only realized when it has been fermented for an extended period by not just one micro-organism (yeast) but by two (yeast and lactobacilli). The raw materials in wheat flour (sugars, starches and proteins) are converted into something that our bodies can better tolerate and assimilate.

But just going to the local bakery or buying “bakery bread” in the grocery store can be a huge deception, and is no guarantee of how the product is actually made.  What many people do not realize is that most “bakery” bread is a frozen product that is manufactured in a far away factory and shipped over great distances before it makes it to your neighborhood store. What we have, despite all appearances and lovely fresh-baked smells and claims of exotic ingredients and sourdough goodness, is a product that is created for the convenience and needs of manufacturing, packaging and distribution and not for the needs of the human organism. As soon as you see “yeast” on the list of ingredients, you know you have a product where the process has been accelerated to make the process of getting the bread to you more effiicient.

And even if you are of the small minority of people who home bake, if you use packaged or fresh yeast, you have also succumbed to the God of convenience. Only a tiny minority of people use natural fermentation (sourdough) cultures. And an even tinier minority will go so far as to develop their own sourdough cultures.

I happen to be one of these people. Part of the reason I did this was to have the best bread possible without having to second-guess the motives behind products that are made for the needs of its producers and their processes. I feel the same way about other slow foods, and I have had the pleasure to support other artisans that enlist the help of our microscopic world instead of raging battle against it.

The funny thing is that developing my own sourdough culture cost nothing, and only requires a minimum of maintenance. I don’t ever have to buy yeast. The fermentation process is long, but after 10 minutes of mixing I don’t have to do anything. My microscopic buddies do the work, and I only have to check and feed them a couple of times over the 48 hour period that it takes to get finished loaves. While the plastic wrap cardboard slices in the supermarket now cost over $3 a loaf and still made with questionable ingredients and additives like bleached flour, dough conditioners, steroyl-2 lactate and BHT, my sourdough bread is made with locally grown and milled unbleached organic wheat flour, all for about 70 cents per loaf.

Unfortunately, most people will never taste the rich complex flavours that my unique sourdough culture brings to something simple like bread.

We have become slaves of convenience where the short-term needs of segregated industrial processes take priority over the needs of the people they serve and the environment we live in. The result is that we are now beginning to see more and more problems with food safety, such as e. coli, listeriosis and the ease in which ingredients can be substituted to create the illusion of quality, as with the recent melamine crisis in China. We are increasingly fighting the natural processes that are really there to try and help us.

What is really interesting is when we try and undo ourselves from this type of dependence on these things that are not really good for us and our planet. I have taken a personal election to apply this reasoning in all of my affairs, especially when it comes to my professional life as a learning and performance consultant.

This has put me at incredible odds with the established business environment, that is more interested in the capacity to manage and navigate a system that is increasingly unhealthy and in some cases becoming downright dangerous. I often feel like I am selling long distance to people who don’t understand the concept of the telephone, who can’t see the forest for the trees, or can’t remember that they are supposed to be draining the swamp because they are up to their necks in alligators.

It has become all about process, distribution and deliverables, at the expense of quality of the content and the learning experience itself.  We are too busy creating the illusion of quality but delivering a product that has little or no nutritional value. In other words, the learning profession is delivering cardboard white bread and can get away with it because nobody has ever tasted the real thing.

My goal is to get people to experience the flavour of real bread, and develop a taste for real learning.